General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Look Out, Officer! (师兄撞鬼)

Look Out, Officer! (師兄撞鬼; pinyin: shi1 xiong1 zhuang4 gui3) is a 1990 Hong Kong comedy film directed by Lau Sze-yu (劉仕裕) and starring Stephen Chow, Bill Tung, Stanley Fung, Vivian Chen, Amy Yip, and Sunny Fang. It mixes the ghost-comedy and police-procedural formulas that were popular in Hong Kong cinema at the time: a murdered detective returns as a ghost and helps a bumbling rookie cop bring his killer to justice.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	師兄撞鬼 (simplified 师兄撞鬼), pinyin shi1 xiong1 zhuang4 gui3; English title Look Out, Officer!²
Director / screenwriter	Lau Sze-yu (劉仕裕); screenplay by Tsui Ching-hong (徐正康)¹
Principal cast	Stephen Chow (阿星), Bill Tung (張標), Stanley Fung (阿錦/李錦), Vivian Chen (阿玉), Sunny Fang (鄧李洋), Amy Yip¹^•³
Release	Hong Kong 28 July 1990; Taiwan 10 October 1990¹^•⁴
Hong Kong box office	HK$12,128,944, 20th among 1990 Hong Kong releases⁵
Production	Cosmopolitan Film Productions (大都會電影製作) with Shaw Brothers; distributed by D&B Films (德寶)⁶
Genre	Comedy with action, fantasy, and crime elements; Cantonese and Mandarin dialogue¹^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Detective Chang Piao (張標, played by Bill Tung) is shot dead by the drug lord Tang Lee-yang (鄧李洋, Sunny Fang) while investigating a drug-manufacturing case; Tang disguises the scene as a suicide over gambling debts. Unwilling to let his reputation suffer, Chang bribes a judge in the underworld court and returns to the living world to find someone who can avenge him.¹

His chosen savior is Hsing (阿星, Stephen Chow), a rookie constable just out of police school who teams up with Chang's old partner Chin (阿錦, Stanley Fung). Chang possesses Hsing's gun and uses his powers to make Hsing's fortunes turn, helping him get close to Chin's daughter Yu (阿玉, Vivian Chen), whom Hsing is courting, so that Hsing will help him find the killer. Hsing realizes that Chang is a ghost and agrees to help him find the killer in exchange for help with his love life and career.¹^•³^•⁸^•¹⁸

Chin, who dislikes Hsing courting his daughter, makes trouble for him, and the two officers also torment Chin with the ghost's help. Sensing that Chang has returned, Tang hires an evil sorcerer, who tricks Chin, a practitioner of Maoshan (Taoist folk-magic tradition famous for exorcism and ghost spells) Taoist magic, into sealing Chang's ghost inside a golden ghost-catching coffin. Guided by the Maoshan patriarch, Hsing and Chin prepare a counter-spell elixir, free the ghost, and, with the patriarch possessing one of them, defeat the sorcerer and Tang; Hsing shoots Tang dead, avenging Chang so he can ascend to heaven in peace.¹^•⁹

Production and context

The film was produced by Cosmopolitan Film Productions Co., Ltd. (大都會電影製作有限公司) together with Shaw Brothers, and distributed by D&B Films (德寶電影公司). Lau Tin-chi (劉天賜) produced, Wong Man-wan (黃文雲) was the director of photography, Chiang Hsing-lung (姜興隆) the editor, and Chow Gam-cheung (周錦祥) composed the music; action choreography was credited to Benz Kong To-hoi (江道海) and Poon Kin-kwan (潘健君).⁶^•¹^•¹⁰

For Stephen Chow it was his first film for Shaw Brothers, made with Metropolitan Film Production, the company founded by Mona Fong (方逸華), Shaw's longtime partner. Shaw Brothers had announced the end of its own production years earlier, and collaborations with Chow such as this film, Justice, My Foot!, Mad Monk, Love on Delivery, and Out of the Dark kept the Shaw name visible at the box office into the mid-1990s.¹¹

The film belongs to the Hong Kong ghost-comedy tradition that grew out of Sammo Hung's Encounters of the Spooky Kind (1980), which combined kung fu with supernatural material and Maoshan sorcery gags and opened a distinct Hong Kong fantasy subgenre in the 1980s.¹² A contemporary commentary describes Look Out, Officer! as an old-fashioned ghost comedy pairing a new-generation star with older comedians, padded with the Maoshan exorcism spectacles then fashionable in Hong Kong film.¹³

Title

The Chinese title's first word, 師兄, has a specific Cantonese meaning: in the police context it is the term for a male police officer, which is why the title reads naturally to a Hong Kong audience as something like "the senior constable runs into a ghost." A study of Japanese translations of Chow's film titles uses this film as its example of a title whose Cantonese sense must be reconstructed for translation.¹⁴

Box office and reception

The film ran in Hong Kong cinemas from 28 July to 16 August 1990 and earned HK$12,128,944, placing 20th in the 1990 Hong Kong box-office chart, a year in which Chow's All for the Winner topped the list at HK$41,326,156.¹⁰^•⁵ In Taiwan it played from 10 to 24 October 1990 and grossed NT$5,154,970.⁴

Aggregated audience scores are modest: IMDb lists 5.8 out of 10 and Douban 7.0.⁶ A retrospective fan commentary credits the film's watchability to the contrast between Chow's emerging deadpan, absurdist style and the older school of comedy acting around him, rather than to the plot, which it calls unremarkable.¹⁵

Versions and runtime

Sources disagree on the film's length: the Chinese encyclopedia entry gives 94 minutes, the HamiVideo streaming listing 92 minutes, the 18dao reference 87 minutes, FMDb 1 hour 31 minutes, and Rotten Tomatoes and Apple TV 1 hour 30 minutes.¹^•⁸^•⁹^•¹⁶^•¹⁷ The film was rated Category II in Hong Kong and is available with both Cantonese and Mandarin audio tracks on current streaming platforms.¹^•⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 1990 to 1994 › Titles K to W

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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